Around 1987, Metin Seven started a Dutch game development team called Soft Eyes. It was one of the first game development teams in the Netherlands.
Soft Eyes existed of two coders: Reinier van Vliet and Pieter ("Peter") Opdam, a music composer: Ramon Braumuller, and Metin. All team members came from a demo-scene background, and each of them had upgraded from a Commodore 64 to a Commodore Amiga computer.
At the time, Metin had just started to create computer graphics, and Pieter was still the team's main graphic artist, next to being a coder. So initially Metin was more of an assistant graphic artist, and his other activities included providing game design ideas with sketches on paper, writing the manuals, taking care of publicity, approaching potential publishers by snail mail and by
visiting computer shows in the UK, such as the Personal Computer World (PCW) Show and the European Computer Trade Show (ECTS) in London.
At the time Soft Eyes was formed, Reinier and Pieter had started developing a game called Ragnov, featuring a small sprite of a character with a jetpack, flying through a maze that scrolls in all directions. Ragnov's biggest feature was a split-screen two-player mode, allowing you to shoot at each other. At this initial stage, Ragnov's graphics were made by Reinier and Pieter.
In 1988, Soft Eyes decided to release a demo version of Ragnov, and Metin sent demo diskettes to several international publishers by snail mail. The demo featured a demo-scene style intro with a real-time 3D
vector-balls effect, and an uplifting soundtrack by Ramon, made in
SIDmon, Soft Eyes' own music editor featuring generated synthetic sounds next to digitized sound.
The publishers responded positively, and included suggestions to make the game more interesting. Metin started writing down new ideas and created his first batch of game graphics for Ragnov, but then Reinier lost the source code files in a unfortunate backup accident.
The team decided not to reinitiate the project, but to focus on new projects: a shoot-'em-up game called
Venom Wing, a sequel to the SIDmon music editor called
Digital Mugician, and a platform game called
Hoi. Hoi Level 3 became a tribute to the lost Ragnov game, where Hoi's main character flies around with a jetpack, accompanied by a Digital Mugician remix of Ramon's SIDmon tune for Ragnov. More Ragnov elements were reused in Hoi, such as Ragnov's segmented dragon and a stylized animated explosion. Ragnov's jetpack concept became a recurring theme in the team's games, and resurfaced in their 1997
Moon Child Windows game, world 3.
Included among the files are the Ragnov Amiga demo, Ramon's Ragnov tune and the Hoi level 3 remix of that tune, screenshots, game graphics and a (crappy quality) video recording of the game.
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